“An incredible human.”

That’s how Bill Ackman described Jensen Huang on November 8, shortly after Huang acknowledged an extramarital affair with a woman US intelligence identified as a likely Chinese spy.

“A piece of shit.”

That’s how Jensen Huang reportedly described Jensen Huang during his final hours as CEO of the company he built from niche supplier of video game graphics accelerators into torchbearer of the new industrial revolution.

By the end of what surely counted among the worst weeks of his life, Huang’s net worth was down to “just” $135 billion or so.

Jensen’s implied fortune peaked near $200 billion early in October. As the figure above shows, he’s lost more than $60 billion on paper since, or roughly half a dozen Bill Ackmans.

Despite Donald Trump’s “fight, fight, fight” exhortations (Trump apparently called Huang on November 10 and urged him not to resign), Jensen was despondent by the time the board moved to oust him following revelations that in addition to his relationship with a purported Chinese intelligence asset, he was also intimate with Nvidia’s VP of healthcare.

Sources who spoke to Bloomberg said that by Wednesday, Jensen was “using phrases like ‘whatever’ and ‘I don’t care.'” I probably wouldn’t care either. If I were Huang, I’d likely be in New Zealand by now, hanging out in a bungalow built into the side of a seaside cliff. (“Don’t give me that ‘It’s not for sale’ shit. Everything‘s for sale! I’d know!”)

He’ll have to do better than “whatever” when he testifies next month before the Senate Banking Committee. The top Democrat on the panel is Elizabeth Warren, the only person on Earth who makes Jamie Dimon nervous. “[A resignation] does not absolve him,” Warren said, of Huang’s exit from Nvidia.

Howard Lutnick’s supposed to show up at that same hearing, and it looks like the administration’s prepared to throw him under the bus. “You’ll have to ask them about their internal processes,” Scott Bessent told CNBC on Friday, referring to the Commerce Department, when asked about billions of Nvidia hardware sold to Alice Huang’s Singaporean neocloud, Megaspeed.

“Treasury, War, USTR and State were in favor of putting Megaspeed on the entity list for months,” Bessent went on. “But Commerce has the pen.” (Yikes, Howard.) On Wednesday, Axios reported that Lutnick has “repeatedly” stymied efforts to “crack down on companies suspected of diverting Nvidia’s advanced AI chips to China.”

Of course, the coordinated effort to make Lutnick the fall guy is disingenuous. The buck stops with Trump and it’s abundantly clear he simply didn’t view the situation as a serious enough threat to national security to risk taking action that might’ve adversely affected Nvidia or its omnipotent CEO.

Consider the following two excerpts, the first from an article published in The New York Times, the second from a piece published by The Atlantic.

• The president’s advisers said he was blasé about the national security implications when told of the intelligence community assessments related to Mr. Huang. One aide said that Mr. Trump saw the episode mainly through the lens of adultery, and that the president dismissed the idea of Mr. Huang’s entanglement posing a threat to the country. Mr. Trump saw Nvidia as essentially too big to fail, aides said.
• Although the full Nvidia story is still emerging, the most alarming revelation may not be that Jensen Huang, America’s most influential AI executive, was involved with a suspected Chinese spy. It may be that senior administration officials were warned about the danger and nevertheless continued relying on him to guide the United States’ technological future. American strategy has come to depend, to an extraordinary degree, on powerful private-sector actors whose incentives the government cannot simply assume will align with the national interest.

That latter bit, from The Atlantic, conjures Aleksandar Kocic’s exposition published here on November 9.

“There exists a boundary,” Kocic wrote, describing a “wealth event horizon” beyond which tech oligarchs “no longer want to buy things or services,” but instead set about “build[ing] parallel infrastructures that the state relies on.” In short: They no longer need the state, the state needs them.

The Trump administration’s “blasé” attitude, to quote the Times, about Huang’s relationship with the woman who presided over a network of shell companies responsible for funneling cutting-edge chips to China, speaks to Kocic’s warning that macro risk has been “fundamentally reshape[d],” with power shifting “from highly predictable, regulated nation-states to unpredictable, hyper-concentrated individual actors.”

This is an existential problem and it may be too late to solve it. We rely, all of us, governments included, on technology controlled by a small handful of people. In some cases (but not all) they can be stripped of their official titles and we can trot them up to Capitol Hill so Elizabeth Warren can embarrass them on national television, but that doesn’t address the problem.

As Kocic prophetically wrote, markets and geopolitics are now subject to “a single individual’s whim, mood, or personal ideology,” a state of affairs which introduces “severe, non-linear volatility that macro models cannot accurately price.”

Speaking of prophetic, all of the above harkens to my “gods” thesis as advanced repeatedly in these pages during 2020, 2021 and 2022. Allow me to quote from one of those “gods” articles. The passages below are from a piece published here on April 14, 2022, just after Elon Musk made a cash bid for Twitter.

[T]he premise is comically oxymoronic. “I’ll free Twitter from the tyrannical influence of liberal censorship by bringing it under the control of one man — me,” Musk seems to be saying.

But what he’s really telegraphing (perhaps without realizing it), is that his whims are becoming synonymous with everyone else’s reality, commensurate with the size of his fortune.

The faster the wealth creation machine spins, the more true that’ll become, until everything we do is in some way, shape or form, a manifestation or projection of one person’s impulses inclinations and fantasies.

Mic drop.